TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
A4
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EDITORIAL
New way
to draw
districts
Was anybody really surprised that Oregon legisla-
tors couldn’t agree on redistricting? We’re guessing you
weren’t.
It’s too political. There’s too much at stake — control
of the Legislature and the majority of Oregon’s seats in
Congress. Democrats have that clinched for now and
perhaps for the future.
Does Oregon need a new way of redistricting? It’s long
been suggested that a nonpartisan commission draw the
lines rather than the almost certainly partisan process of
the Legislature. There’s been efforts to get it on the ballot
before. And on Tuesday, as The Oregonian reported, it
was announced there would be a new effort to get the
idea of an independent redistricting commission on the
ballot in 2022.
“The promise of fair representation should not be a
pawn in a partisan political game,” said Norman Turrill,
chair of the People Not Politicians campaign and former
president of the League of Women Voters of Oregon.
Would an independent redistricting commission solve
the problem?
Maybe. We’d like to see the idea on the ballot.
Could the districts be compact, relatively equal in
population, not divide communities and protect minority
representation?
Could a group of people, not politicians look past their
political leanings and try to make it as fair as possible?
The new process would likely also be imperfect. It
certainly feels better than asking politicians to draw
their own districts.
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City
Herald. Columns, letters and cartoons on this page ex-
press the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that
of the Baker City Herald.
LETTER
Stop a killer:
Get vaccinated
There is a killer on the loose in Baker County. In the past
year and a half he’s killed 25 of our citizens. Yet the average
Baker County citizen seems rather unconcerned.
“Why should I worry? In a county of 16,000 my chance of
getting killed is practically zero.”
The killer I refer to is COVID-19 and its variants, the cause
of a world-wide pandemic.
The only way to defeat the virus is through vaccination.
That’s how measles, polio, and other killers have been practi-
cally eliminated from the Earth.
For decades children have not been allowed to attend public
school without proving they’ve been vaccinated for the follow-
ing eight diseases: diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio,
chickenpox, measles, mumps, and rubella.
If we adults think that’s necessary for our children, why
would we not apply the same standard to ourselves? Lamen-
tably Baker County has some of the lowest adult vaccination
rates in the nation.
The only way to defeat the virus is for everyone to get vac-
cinated.
Gary Dielman
Baker City
Science is clear: Catastrophic
fire requires forest management
Last year was a historically
destructive wildfi re season. While
we haven’t yet seen the end of 2021,
nationally 64 large fi res have burned
over 3 million acres. The economic
damage caused by wildfi re in 2020
is estimated at $150 billion. The loss
of communities, loss of life, impacts
on health, and untold environmental
damage to our watersheds — not
to mention the pumping of climate-
changing carbon into the atmosphere
— are devastating. This continuing
disaster needs to be addressed like
the catastrophe it is.
We are the National Association
of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR),
an organization of dedicated natural
resource professionals — fi eld prac-
titioners, fi refi ghters, and scientists
— with thousands of years of on-the-
ground experience. Our membership
lives in every state of the nation. We
are dedicated to sustaining healthy
National Forests and National Grass-
lands, the lands managed by the U.S.
Forest Service, to provide clean water,
quality outdoor recreation, wildlife
and fi sh habitat, and carbon seques-
tration, and to be more resilient to
catastrophic wildfi re as our climate
changes. We are pleased that much
of the American public and Congress
seem supportive of action to alter our
current terrible path to continuing
wildfi re disasters.
We are, however, dismayed at the
proliferation of misinformation about
what can be done about wildfi res.
More work is needed to address
many issues within the wildland-
urban interface (in which people
live in proximity to forestlands) and,
of course, the national and global
priority of climate change. Alongside
this work, reducing fuels by thin-
ning forests followed by prescribed
burning — especially in our western
mixed conifer and ponderosa pine for-
ests — is essential. Such work must
be increased quickly on a landscape
STEVE
ELLIS
scale if we are to even begin to save
our forests and communities.
Small treatment areas, scattered
“random acts of restoration” across
the landscape, are not large enough
to make a meaningful difference. De-
cades of fi eld observations and peer
reviewed research both document the
effectiveness of strategic landscape
fuel treatments and support the
pressing need to do more. The cost of
necessary treatments is a fraction of
the wildfi re damage such treatments
can prevent. Today’s wildfi res in over-
stocked forests burn so hot and on
such vast acreages that reforestation
becomes diffi cult or next to impos-
sible in some areas. Soil damage and
erosion become extreme. Watersheds
which supply vital domestic, indus-
trial, and agricultural water are dam-
aged or destroyed.
Restoring our forests to a more
natural level of tree density does
not mean clear-cutting and does not
mean removing the largest trees. It
does mean striving for and achieving
forests which can withstand wildfi re
without massive damage to forests,
wildlife, watersheds and communi-
ties. Research now shows that, in
California before European settle-
ment, most forest types contained
around 60 trees per acre. Today
it is 300 trees per acre, helping to
make the incredible fi re behavior
and damage we now see more and
more common.
This summer, America watched
with great apprehension as the
Caldor Fire approached South Lake
Tahoe. In a community briefi ng,
wildfi re incident commander Rocky
Oplinger described how active man-
agement of forestlands assisted fi re-
fi ghters. “When the fi re spotted above
Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment
that helped reduce fl ame lengths
from 150 feet to 15 feet, enabling
fi refi ghters to mount a direct attack
and protect homes,” The Los Angeles
Times quoted him.
And in a Sacramento Bee inter-
view in which fi re researcher Scott
Stephens was asked how much con-
sensus there is among fi re scientists
that fuels treatments do help, he
answered “I’d say at least 99%. I’ll
be honest with you, it’s that strong;
it’s that strong. There’s at least 99%
certainty that treated areas do mod-
erate fi re behavior. You will always
have the ignition potential, but the
fi res will be much easier to manage.”
I don’t know if it’s 99% or not, but a
wildfi re commander with decades
of experience recently told me this
fi gure would be at least 90%. What is
important here is that there is broad
agreement among professionals that
properly treated landscapes do mod-
erate fi re behavior.
During my career, I have person-
ally witnessed fi re dropping from tree
crowns to the ground when it hit a
thinned forest. So have many NAFSR
members. This is an issue where
scientists and practitioners agree.
More strategic landscape treatments
are necessary to help avoid increas-
ingly disastrous wildfi res. So, the
next time you read or hear someone
say that thinning and prescribed fi re
in the forest does not work, remem-
ber that nothing can be further from
the truth.
Steve Ellis, chair of the National
Association of Forest Service Retirees,
is a former U.S. Forest Service Forest
Supervisor, including the Wallowa-
Whitman National Forest in Baker
City, and retired Bureau of Land
Management Deputy Director for Op-
erations — the senior career position
in that agency’s Washington, D.C.,
headquarters.
OTHER VIEWS
Editorial from St. Louis Post-
Dispatch:
Congressional testimony this
week by the top Pentagon offi cials
charged with the Afghanistan
pullout made clear that President
Joe Biden opted against their rec-
ommendation against completely
withdrawing U.S. troops. Instead,
Biden insisted on a hasty pullout,
leading to disastrous results. The
advisers didn’t seem proud about
their assessment, nor did they
try to sugarcoat the Pentagon’s
various missteps that blocked a
successful end to the 20-year war.
They were bluntly — and
refreshingly — honest. America
needs a lot more of that.
Washington politicians on both
sides of the aisle have grown so
fearful of the truth, they seem
willing to say or do anything to
hide it from the American people.
Biden is only the latest in a long
succession of U.S. leaders who
have lied to protect their legacies
and their own fragile egos rather
than choose blunt honesty so the
nation can learn from its mistakes
and avoid repeating them in
the future.
In a Senate hearing Tuesday,
questioners gave Gens. Mark
Milley and Kenneth McKenzie no
room for evasion when it came to
the advice they gave Biden about
the potential consequences of a
full withdrawal. Milley has served
as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff under both Biden and
former President Donald Trump.
Though he wouldn’t give specif-
ics about his private conversations
with them, Milley stated: “I recom-
mended that we maintain 2,500
troops in Afghanistan, and I also
recommended [to Trump] early in
the fall of 2020 that we maintain
4,500 at that time. Those were
my personal views. I also had a
view that the withdrawal of those
forces would lead inevitably to the
collapse of the Afghan military
forces and eventually the Afghan
government.”
McKenzie, head of the U.S.
Central Command, agreed with
Milley’s assessment, though
neither believed the Afghan
military’s collapse would come so
quickly. In retrospect, though, they
recognized how the forecasting by
both presidents of a “date certain”
withdrawal negotiated with the
Taliban enemy contributed to
Afghan troops’ feelings that they
were being abandoned.
Biden not only rejected their
advice, he proceeded to lie about
it in an Aug. 18 ABC interview
when he asserted that none of
his advisers had recommended
against the withdrawal.
Milley also acknowledged
mistakes in trying to apply
traditional U.S. military doctrine
and training to a guerrilla warfare
situation incompatible with the
American model. In other words,
U.S. commanders got it wrong and
failed to pivot once they knew this.
Trump and Biden also failed to
pivot, instead stubbornly insisting
on specifi c parameters and time-
lines to meet their political needs.
Biden’s administration continues
trying to portray the result as
a success when it was anything
but that.
The fi rst step in any lessons-
learned exercise is admitting
that there are lessons still to be
learned. Milley and McKenzie get
that. Too bad Biden still doesn’t.